There are a number of benefits to living in a country whose language is not entirely transparent to you. It’s easier to tune out ambient human noise. Maybe it’s not so much tuning out as changing the station from talk radio to instrumental music.

Sometimes your translation module misfires and produces interesting results. A few nights ago I passed a newsagent with a national lottery sign in the window and the word loterij came out as “fate store”.

You see these orange and blue signs everywhere but the idea of buying fate made me stop and look long enough to realize that my memory of the logo was wrong. I remembered it as a little fish eating a big fish, meaning “Dream big. Yeah, it’s a long shot, but hey, you never know.” (Which actually is the tagline of the New York lottery.)

But the Dutch logo is a big fish eating a little fish which seems like a cold, fishy slap in the face to the irrational hope that lotteries are based on: “Wake up, chum. The reality is, the big fish eat the little fish. That’s the way of the world.” (An idea long familiar to the phlegmatic Dutch.)

There was a California lottery campaign years ago in which celebrities explained their favorite numbers to play. Steve Wozniak said he played 1-2-3-4-5-6 because it had just as much chance as any other combination. I still wonder if he was just trying to plant a rationalist mind bomb by directly contradicting one of the common cognitive biases of lottery players, that winning combinations are more “random”.

State lotteries have been called a regressive tax because the people who play are mainly lower income. If you think the lottery is your only chance at economic success, then it probably doesn’t seem irrational at all. And a recent study indicates that people are more likely to play when made to feel subjectively poorer. The same study also says that people play more when reminded that they have just as much chance to win as anyone else. For someone who feels the world as a whole is unfair, even rigged, the lottery looks like a rare even playing field.

A planner doing research for a state lottery once told me that among poor Hispanics there was a belief that God wants to help you but you have to give him the chance by buying a ticket. That sounds like an incredibly addictive formula, a self-stabilizing system of fate, chance and something like freedom.

None of this, however, helped me to understand the Dutch lottery logo. It turns out that it’s an illustration of a Dutch saying: You have to throw out a smelt to catch a cod. According to my Big Book of Dutch Idioms, this means "to offer up something small in order to get something much bigger in return." The contextual example it gives is from the surprisingly topical area of Dutch drug policy which tolerates marijuana (the small offering) in return for decreased criminality and hard drug use.

But a lottery ticket doesn't offer a reasonable expectation of return. So the small fish isn't the price of anything. It's just an offering to fate.

For Anjali and other failurephiles, there's a nice piece on the New York Times songwriting blog by Peter Holsapple of the dB's about how one of their best songs, "Love Is For Lovers", ended in commercial failure. I preferred the song "Amplifier" whose demise he describes in passing, but in general, the dB's were one of the bands that me and my high-school friends most wanted to sound like. (The other being Rush, so we were handicapped by our confused aspirations as well as our limited skills.)

So have you chosen your funeral music yet? No rush, but I figure we’ve got about fifty years left and it took me almost forty to settle on mine, so I’m just saying. And I'm not sure why, but there seems to be a lot of advertising in the Netherlands just now for funeral insurance: uitvaart verzekering or "outward voyage insurance". (I enjoy the visible brickwork of Germanic languages.)

I've seen one ad specifically focused on music as something you might want to prearrange. Which is worth considering, if only to avoid those unfortunate choices that are sometimes made on the basis of a title or single lyric taken out of context (e.g. "Every Breath You Take" at a wedding). I think this company missed the irony when they chose "This Is The Life" to illustrate their Celebrate! (vieren) funeral package.

I saw this CD in the library yesterday and began to think about what makes music work at a funeral. Classical seems to be a standard choice and within that there are the standards: Barber, Pachelbel, adagios in general. Solemn and bittersweet seem to be the watchwords.

Which I guess is the thing. People generally want to strike a balance between grief and acceptance. Things become clichés because they work and adagios work because they encourage a slow leak of emotion. Enough bleeding to get the hurt out, but slow enough that a scab forms and you don’t die. There’s a nobility to them that marks the occasion and the deceased as important, but stiffens you against complete collapse.

But adagios are also fairly impersonal. They speak about death and impermanence in general. Funerals are increasingly seen as stages for a personal tribute and while not everyone will get a bespoke musical memorial from the likes of Sir Elton, popular songs with personal relevance and familiarity are probably more common than classical standards today.

There are a number of websites that offer lists of popular music for funerals, some of which are quite specific, like songs to be played while white doves are released. Or this one, songs for suicides, which starts off with The Smiths’ "Sing Me To Sleep". I think that if you loved someone who had just killed themselves, hearing this tired voice from the grave would be more disturbing than consoling. Despite Morissey's plea not to feel bad for him, you’d feel blamed, or at least, at fault. Plus, it’s just heartbreaking. If your heart is already broken, I’m not sure that’s useful. And funerals, and funeral music, should be emotionally useful. Again, there’s a difference between choking up and just choking.

I think there’s something to be said for creating a sense of wonder at your funeral. Wonder that this particular person existed. About the ways we do and don’t belong in the world. How a stream of experience makes a person and then stops. Or maybe goes on. And you can call it a “celebration”, but saying goodbye to someone you loved isn’t fun. Stately is good but sombre isn’t necessary. For me, wonder captures all of that. It means appreciating without falling apart. It might change at some point, but for some time now my funeral music has been "Spider and I" by Brian Eno.

I was in Reims on Saturday, waiting for this clock to ring and thinking about the digital revolution that made it possible. Not the current wave of digital tools, but the more profound revolution in digital thinking that got started around the same time as Reims cathedral, when Western society began to understand the power of viewing the world in bits and what had been unwieldy, continuous smears of qualities (time, space, sound, weight) were resolved into discrete numbers that could be stored, compared and manipulated to reveal not only underlying natural laws but new ideas and inventions that had previously been literally unthinkable.

The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society describes this first digital revolution in such an elegant, interesting way I’m ashamed to admit that I only started reading it because it’s green, but there you are. Alfred Crosby (who seems like a pretty cool guy) doesn’t ignore the usual material stuff like clocks and cash, but unlike Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs and Steel (aka the Official Book of Interestingness), his concern is what French historians call mentalité, a society’s mental model of reality, and how a new, quantitative approach to reality came to dominate our thinking:

In practical terms, the new approach was simply this: reduce what you are trying to think about to the minimum required by its definition; visualize it on paper, or at least in your mind, be it the fluctuation of wool prices at the Champagne fairs or the course of Mars through the heavens, and divide it, either in fact or in imagination, into equal quanta. Then you can measure it, that is, count the quanta.

Then you possess a quantitative representation of your subject that is, however simplified, even in its errors and omissions, precise. You can think about it rigorously. You can manipulate it and experiment with it, as we do today with computer models. It possesses a sort of independence from you. It can do for you what verbal representation rarely does: contradict your fondest wishes and elbow you on to more efficacious speculation. It was quantification, not aesthetics, not logic per se, that parried Kepler’s every effort to thrust the solar system into a cage of his beloved Platonic solids and goaded him on until he grudgingly devised his planetary laws.

The idea that digital products possess an independence, a life of their own, that they can contradict not just your wishes but your intentions, reminds me of the New Order song, Blue Monday. The story is that the now iconic sixteenth-note kick drum stutter was an accident. They just hadn’t learned how to program their new DMX drum machine. The thing about digital is, you push the button and the machine pushes back. Like Kepler’s orbit calculations, once you set some initial conditions, the number crunching begins and follows its own precise trajectory, producing a result that may delight or disgust.

It’s also rumoured that New Order sampled the choir sound from Kraftwerk’s Uranium. Kraftwerk is a useful counterexample. Because the real significance of the digital revolution isn’t what it allows you to do, but how it makes you think. Kraftwerk, for all their machinophilia, are classically trained musicians who think analog. They might have produced the intro to Blue Monday, but they probably would have thrown it away as a mistake. (I can’t believe I’m criticizing Kraftwerk, but once again, there you are.)

What we’re experiencing today is not just one digital revolution, but the combined impact of three: we’re using 800 year-old digital minds to manipulate digital content with digital tools. We can create entire musical genres with the unintended flip of a switch and then say, “Hey that’s not bad. I’ll call it hard dub grime step.”

Which is also what medieval digital musicians were doing. Gregorian chant was basically monophonic and not divided into regular notes. There was no sense that this syllable was one half or one third or one sixteenth of that one. Every syllable was just as long as it needed to be. Then someone (maybe a priest at Notre Dame in Paris named Léonin) started to put a new, friskier melody on top of the chant and polyphony took off. To do that, he needed to use a digital frame (musical staff) that broke musical time into regular quanta so that the different parts could be lined up. To make matters even more interesting, the added melodies were often snatched from popular secular music overheard on the streets. So the result was not only “sampled” but was a true mashup. That’s right: Western music is based on medieval mashups. Take that RIAA.

Digital mind + tools + content means treating products like fruit flies in a lab, (re)combining quickly, over and over and being surprised at the result. That’s the way I do a lot of music these days. I set stuff up and let it run then look for the interesting results. Here are some sound files I made as part of a series on the periodic table. All were made with the very lovely Reaktor and various effect plug-ins:

The funny thing is, we're so thoroughly digital now that we can leisurely return to the pre-digital days before Léonin, before meter and notes, when time was an indivisible stream and sounds were just as long as they needed to be.(image: Digital Cathedral, VCL/ISTI)

In the battle for best rock song expressing the idea: “Whoa, I totally thought that dude was a lady.”

Which is immediately one point to Aerosmith for clarity of expression. And one point to the Kinks for non-clarity because making you think your way to the message makes it more memorable and persuasive.

The protagonists of both songs eventually decide that if it feels good, do it. So neither loses points for chickening out. But Aerosmith gets a Ballsy Bonus because their core audience was probably somewhat more homophobic.

They earn a similarly testicular Balls Out Power-Up for unapologetic rocking of what could be cabaret material. Lola picks up some growly volume in the middle eight, but overall, it might easily be performed by a man in a top hat.

But Steven Tyler actually has performed in a top hat, so that point is withdrawn.

Both songs deliver a largely queer-positive message to a popular audience. Unlike Lou Reed, neither performer had a foot in the art world which would have been a soft target. (Walk On The Wild Side is doubly ineligible for competition because there is no revelatory whoa moment. Holly shaved her legs long before Lou met her.) As a pop mind-bomb however, Lola has the edge because it's just so damn catchy, a natural camp/fire singalong.

So it's tied at two all. Time for the Special Guest Tiebreaker from someone who knows more about the subject than Tyler and Davies put together. (Which nobody wants to see really. But you really should see Nobody Someday.)

Since our books are now sorted by color, I spend less time picking things to read before bedtime. I just think, "I'll have a green one." Which is how I started reading The Skeptic's Guide to the Paranormal. The author, Lynne Kelly, is an Australian science teacher with the best possible attitude for a proselytizing skeptic which is basically, "It would be really cool if ghosts and levitation and telepathy existed, but sadly, there's just no evidence for them. Worse yet, most of the supposed evidence is outright fraud. Believe me, I'm just as disappointed as you are."

One of the few examples that isn't fraud, but just an interesting phenomenon, is spontaneous human combustion. Although it's not spontaneous. Kind of the opposite. In fact, you have to be dead or at least deeply unconscious for it to happen at all. It seems to be the result of a grotesque wicking effect in which a slow-burning article of clothing or furniture draws the fat out of your body and burns like the wick of a greasy, human candle, eventually reducing your body to ash while leaving nearby surroundings (and less fatty body parts like feet and hands) unscorched.

Kelly also describes how paranormal beliefs are reinforced by our tendency to interpret evidence selectively, remembering only positive results and seeing false patterns in randomness. She illustrates this point with a bravura interpretation of Kubla Khan, which not only predicts the war in Afghanistan but reveals exactly where Bin Laden is hiding.

Coleridge's poem is famously incomplete, but I was still surprised that all the versions I found on the Web were missing the section in which the author falls into despair, immortal but frozen in time, ironically trapped inside the paradise he spent his life seeking. Then I realized I was thinking of the song Xanadu by Rush.

Being a Rush fan is pretty much being a nerd and since nerds are now cool, Rush is finally hanging with the coolkids. Yes, the Ayn Rand fixation was almost as tiresome as Rand's novels themselves, but Rush was all about stuff that nerdy teenagers found worth thinking about: technology, freewill, science. The tempo changes were sometimes hard to follow, but what they were saying was always clear and interesting (unlike many of their more proggy brethern who drifted off into vague space imagery).

Rush is the secret nerd handshake. The best research I ever did was a portrait of IT culture for Microsoft. I have a copy of the tape that I still watch today and think, "These are my people. This is my tribe." One of my favorite interviews was with the IT director at a cable network in New York. We were talking about art and music and he mentioned a list of bands, including Rush. I said, "Rush?" He tilted his head to look at me over his glasses, "You like Rush?" It was as if he'd opened the bottom drawer of his desk and pulled out a bottle of bourbon and two glasses. "I was in an all-Rush cover band. To me, their music is like beautiful code. Tight. Clean." We both nodded, kicking back at La Villa Strangiato, thirty floors above Times Square.

But music is the secret handshake for almost every teen culture, not just nerds. In another interesting green book, Snoop, Sam Gosling describes how undergraduates consistently choose to talk about music much more than any other topic when trying to get to know one another. He then correlates musical genre preferences with actual personality measures in order to assess which types of music actually tell you something true about the people who listen to it. Based on the resulting chart, it seems safe to say that a shared love of Rush probably does reveal deeper similarities than a shared love of, say, Michael Jackson. Though he could tell you something about spontaneous human combustion.

As a Social Studies major, I spent my sophomore year puzzling through The Great Men of European Social Theory: Marx, Weber, Durkheim. I don't think I ever really understood any of them, but I always had a thing for Weber. He seemed to be the most comfortable with messiness and uncertainty. My advisor probably explained my preference more eloquently when he summarized the difference between Marx and Weber in four words: "For Weber, words matter."

Pretended or not, Republican disdain for words has not served them well. I don't think it's just a case of "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade"; that is, faced with an opponent of uncommon eloquence, they decided to equate fine speaking with elitism. For me, the Bush administration's epitaph was written four years ago by the anonymous presidential aide who famously expressed his bosses' contempt for "what we call the reality-based community." As it turns out, words and reality actually do have something to do with one another.

First, thoughtful speech tells you something about the qualities of the thoughts expressed. Clear, careful, confident words communicate that the speaker has thought through the reasons for and consequences of his propositions. Enough said on that point.

Second, and more relevant to my preference for Weber, words matter because as often as not, we act on the basis of words alone. Marxists (and many marketers) may believe that people are largely driven by hidden, underlying forces, material or unconscious, and that the words we use to explain our actions are no more than self-delusion. But that's just wrong. Words matter because expectations shape our behavior in a very concrete, reality-based way. Or to put it more eloquently, words matter because hope matters.